This phrase may sound familiar to you: “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” There have been countless psychological studies that have shown how important it is to put your best foot forward when you first meet someone if you want to leave a positive, lasting impression.
The Super Bowl is a time where people watching TV actually pay attention to the commercials being shown. Even non-football fans will watch - just for the commercials! Some of these advertisements shown are more memorable than others.
Businesses everywhere are learning what many cultures have known for millennia: one of the most powerful tools for creating a lasting impression is a simple story. In our Telling Stories series, we’ll explore why stories are such a powerful inclusion even to a B2B marketing strategy, and how you can incorporate them more into your own efforts. Here in Part 1, we’ll examine the benefits that story-based content can bring to a business-to-business initiative.
If you’ve established social media pages but aren’t doing anything with them, you’re wasting so many valuable opportunities to connect with your target audience. This includes your clients, and even your prospects who decide to seek out more information about you.
As an MSP, your company sells your products and services to other businesses - the typical nature of the business-to-business sector. And, as a business yourself, you probably understand this concept: time is money. You don’t want to waste this valuable resource in any way.
Small businesses need to understand how to successfully convert a lead into a paying customer if they want to remain in business. To know where to start, it’s important to understand the three main categories of leads:
You can market your company through various print and digital advertising methods and successfully generate sales. But, doing so costs your company money, and it isn’t as persuasive as genuine social proof.
You probably recall back in 2010 when BP’s oil rig failed, discharging what was estimated to be 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, affecting somewhere between 2,500 to 68,000 square miles of water and coastlines. In addition to the financial burdens placed on the company (the EPA temporarily banning BP from seeking new contracts with the US government and a whopping $18.7 billion from fines - the largest corporate settlement in US history), the company’s reputation suffered - and, continues to suffer - due to poor reactions from management after the spill occurred.
Words matter. Saying the right thing, whether in writing or verbally, can be one of the most effective tools to ensuring that your audience behaves the way you want them to. However, this also means that saying the wrong thing (or even the right thing in the wrong way) can hurt your chances of reaching your goal. Today, we’ll review some words to avoid in all of your marketing efforts.
Recently, we have been sharing insights on some best practices regarding social media. This time, we’re going to discuss the primary function of social media: engagement.
Time is important to business. It’s even more so in regards to your marketing: an improperly timed campaign will fall on deaf ears, no matter how great your offer is. Your ongoing marketing efforts can suffer as well if you fail to take into account when your audience is prepared to digest your marketing materials. If you are sharing these materials at inopportune times, they will get lost amongst the various other marketing communications that your clients and prospects are receiving from other businesses, including those from your competition.
To make sure that doesn’t happen, you need to consider when you market, not just what you are marketing.
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships and engaging with buyers at each stage of the buying process. Leads often do not move through your sales funnel without any help; you have to give them a little push to eventually (hopefully) turn these leads into paying customers. You do this by nurturing them through your marketing communications.
I’m sure you learned growing up the importance of hygiene. When you were a kid, your parents probably drilled into your head the importance of keeping yourself clean (making sure you wash your hands, bathe regularly, and change your clothes) and maintaining a clean living space (doing things like putting your dishes in the sink, cleaning up spills, and putting your dirty clothes in the hamper). We’re here to talk to you about the importance of a different type of hygiene: email hygiene.
When marketing your company, you’re trying to trigger some sort of response from your target audience. It could be for them to purchase a new add-on you’ve just started offering, or to subscribe to your newsletter. It doesn’t matter what response you’re looking for: no matter what, incorporating visuals into your marketing collateral will help ensure that the message you’re trying to convey is better received.
Even though it might seem like eons for some of us, every now and then, it’s important to think back to when you started down the path of IT services. What was it about business technology that drew you in? You knew that your gift with technology meant you could provide a service of extreme value to other businesses. Technology improves their business and you improve their technology. That spark of idealism is a little thing called passion. You remember it. It’s why you’re here - and the purpose behind remembering why you are a part of the IT channel is more than just a nice stroll down memory lane. Your passion just might be the thing your marketing is missing.
When it comes to marketing yourself and your business as a managed service provider, your content should be the cornerstone of your strategy, supporting everything else you do. Regardless of what format your content is in, it needs to provide proof of your experience and value to prospective clients. Here are a few topics that your audience is likely to respond to.
Opened, read, and clicked; that is what you want out of your email content, right? Despite what you’ve heard, that email you just typed out before your coffee break, is going to be judged solely on the subject line. Frankly, that is the first and only thing your target audience is going to view, or skim, when they hit their inbox.
With the rise in popularity of inbound marketing, specialty managed IT service providers, and many large enterprises starting to target the SMB market, it’s more important than ever that your MSP demonstrates their capabilities. With so many different options for managed IT, cloud computing, data storage, and other solutions, vertical-specific marketing speaks directly to your skill and experience with that industry.
Your content can serve a variety of purposes. It, of course, pulls traffic to your site and provides value to your visitors, giving them a reason to return and bringing you closer to a contact point. However, content can, and unavoidably will, also give your readership an impression of the “personality” of your company, through a variety of aspects. Of course, as a reasonable person, you want your website describing your business as a managed service provider to make as favorable of an impression as possible on those readers who very well could become clients in the near future. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you wish to get a complete examination of what message you are sending to your readership, here are some steps you need to follow.
Sitting down to write content can be intimidating. There’s been a lot of stigma placed around the important role quality content plays in your business’ marketing success. With such a heavy emphasis on content, many MSP owners and IT team members feel they’re not able to produce the caliber of writing needed to constitute ‘quality content’.
